How low-tech, low-cost designs are helping the poorest farmers on Earth grow their way out of poverty.

The famed economist Jeffrey Sachs prescribes classic foreign aid in his recent book, The End of Poverty: hundreds of billions of dollars, overseen by the United Nations and the World Bank, for health clinics, schools, bridges, roads and water supplies.

Then there's Paul Polak, the 71-year-old founder of a nonprofit group that takes a minimalist approach. His Denver organization, International Development Enterprises, develops and markets low-cost, low-tech irrigation devices--essentially a rudimentary collection of foot pumps, barrels and tubes. "The idea here is the ruthless pursuit of affordability," says James Patell, a Stanford business school professor who has worked with Polak on designing inexpensive tools.

The litmus test for IDE products: The farmer can recover the cost of the device within one season. "We are firm believers in markets," Polak says.

Underlying the program is his belief that the basic problem of rural poverty in the developing world boils down to what happens on quarter-acre plots. Of the 1.1 billion people in the world who exist on $1 a day or less, he says, 75% live in rural areas and half eke out fragile livings cultivating small plots of land. Marginally boost their income, and power plants, clinics and schools will follow.

Sachs, too, thinks these small projects are worthwhile. Yet, notes Polak, "So much development work is focused on macroeconomics and increasing GDP per capita." These large-scale government aid programs are doomed to failure because of corruption, bureaucratic sloth and, ultimately, the dependency they breed among recipients, says Polak: "Until the development community realizes that the solution to poverty lies in increasing the wealth of small-plot farmers, it will continue to fail."

Manek Raut owns a 3.5-acre farm in the dusty, semi-arid region of Solapur in western India. Until recently Raut's field lay barren from lack of water, forcing his brother to leave home and Raut to labor for a pittance on a nearby farm to support his seven-member family. His employer's farm flourished using a sophisticated drip irrigation system: a motorized pump connected to long rows of tubes that snake through the crops and drip just enough water onto the roots. Widely used for decades, these commercial systems are far too expensive for poor farmers like Raut.

His fortunes changed when he saw a simpler, low-tech version promoted by IDE in India. It markets a variety, from $2 garden kits to $200 systems covering one acre. Many use a barrel of water and gravity (instead of a motorized pump) to pull the water into tubes made of thinner, cheaper plastic than what conventional systems use. Raut paid $125, borrowed from friends, for his. He is now growing a healthy bounty of okra and beans and expects to earn $300 this season from a cotton crop. He says he can recover his $125 investment from eggplants his mother sells door-to-door.

"Without this drip, this would have remained barren land," says Raut.

Polak's IDE operates on a $10 million annual budget, raised through individual donations and grants from the likes of USAID and the Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation. He primarily hires natives of the countries (ten throughout Asia and Africa) he's in, who recruit manufacturers to build the irrigation devices, drum up demand via grass-roots marketing and advise small-plot farmers on the most profitable crops to grow.

This kind of market-based "sustainable" philanthropy is now fashionable, but it wasn't when Polak began IDE in 1981. "We were seen as capitalists, and capitalism was a dirty word," he says. A psychiatrist with a knack for investing, he put together, over the years, a $3 million portfolio in real estate and oil and gas. In 1981 he vowed never to take a job only for money, cashed out and started IDE. He spent the first several years living on investment income, traveling to remote corners of the world and talking to everyone he could. He had been studying the links between mental health and poverty. Now he was connecting technology and the flight from poverty.

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